


Reunion at Gronder

by stellar_lasers



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 06:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20484479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellar_lasers/pseuds/stellar_lasers
Summary: Five years after the Battle of Eagle and Lion, Byleth and Alliance forces prepare to face their classmates once more. Caught up in the chaos of battle, Byleth hopes to make amends with at least one of her old students.





	Reunion at Gronder

Dawn cracked like an egg, spilling its yolk over the reaching branches of beech and fir and making an island of the bald head of the hill at Gronder.  
Fog swam over the field. Byleth swiped an idle finger through the dew beaded on her gauntlet. The fog served to mute the clank of armoured bodies, and the restless paw of horses’ hooves, and the whisper of voices like spirits.  
“It’s not looking good out there.” Claude leant in close beside her. “See there? That’s red cloth up on the hill already.”  
“What we discussed before…”  
“Yes?”  
Byleth watched streamers of fog tear away in the rush of dawn. “We’ll split in two. Circle the hill. Edelgard can’t fit her entire army up there. She must be somewhere on the ground.”  
Claude’s wyvern shoved a boisterous head under his arm. He jolted forward, grasping its horns, a paternal smile smothered by the first light stabbing through the trees. The paw of horses at their backs became an incessant drumbeat.  
“We planned to take the hill, Teach,” Claude said, rubbing the wyvern’s scaly white scalp. The beast crooned and tossed her head into him gently. “We agreed – we’d have the best view of everything from up there. We could use the ballista to rain holy fire on our enemies – remember?”  
“Claude.” Byleth took his arm.  
The army, nearly all mounted, assembled into a rough line behind them. A forest of axes and spears were glazed in gold. Byleth’s stomach churned at the smell, the smell of turned mud, the crushed grass. When she had stood at Gronder Field five years ago and given orders. And that night, that first night, that she had been with him.  
Now they stood as enemies.  
Byleth loosened her hand from Claude’s. “We’ll take the left, and seek out Dimitri. You’ll go right. You recall the fortifications in the elbow of the river – I think you’ll find her there. Take Leonie and Ignatz with you. Don’t stop for anything.”  
Across the plain, a trumpet sounded. The fog burnt away in great sheafs now, coiling its sorry remnants towards the river, leaving naked stands of beech and oak, and the mossy flanks of old barricades exposed.  
A hundred voices cried. Stars went up as Blue Lion spears jabbed at the belly of the sky.  
Byleth felt Claude tugging at her sleeve. But she had eyes only for the dawn.  
“The faster we are, the fewer we kill.”  
“Teach – the plan-”  
“Now!” screamed Byleth, as the flash of spears began to cascade through the forest. She sought it out one last desperate time, the swatch of red and black between river and hill. Be safe, she prayed. Be safe!  
Claude tore away from her. His wyvern leapt into the sky, great clap of wings startling the horses pouring left and right. Claude’s voice fell like thunder. “Ignatz, Leonie, Marianne – with me!”  
Horse flank and orange cape flashed by. “Leonie!”  
Leonie didn’t look back at her. She held a hand up. The note pinched between her thumb and forefinger. Her horse plunged along the rocky tributary that would lead them to the river, already pulling ahead of Ignatz and the other mounted troops.  
“We win this for Jeralt!”  
“I’d hate to be the Empire in her way.” Lorenz brought his black horse trotting around in front of Byleth. His gaze was not unsympathetic. “Well? Would you like a lift? We’re falling behind.”  
Hilda led the charge of troops to the left, where boulders broke the ground and the plain was scattered with trees.  
Byleth slipped a foot into the stirrup and pulled herself up behind Lorenz. “Go. As fast as you can.”

  
He cloaked himself in the shadow of a mouldering barricade, nostrils full of mildew and mud.  
He couldn’t hear Edelgard from here. Nor could he see the Kingdom army, secreted away by the bulk of the hill. He could see Bernadetta though, or at least her archers, tracing trajectories from hill to plain. He watched a sudden stir through their number, heads twisting like deer to the west.  
Hubert leant against the mossy oak. Moss and bark both caved away under the brush of his shoulder. Two dozen pegasus knights waited behind the barricade, the crowns of their heads bobbing over spiked timber. One whistled to him. He whistled back. A flat note – please wait.  
Then he heard it. The cry of the knights posted at the bridge. Something of the bloodiness of it caught the ears of the monster Edelgard had set roaming about the plain. The monster bellowed, painfully, a strange cry of cracking stone.  
“Now, sir?” the whistle came.  
Bodies crumpling at the bridge. Sun flashing off armour. Hubert realised he had shifted forward, out of the cover of the barricade.  
“Yes,” he called, “yes, quickly, now.”  
He didn’t quite believe it. The wings of horses beat in his ears. White bodies of pegasuses flowed around the barricade. Spikes thrust into the sky. He waded in yellow grass up to his waist. No warning, no battle cry from the Alliance, no glorious death knell. He almost had to respect that.  
His heart began to throb as Alliance forces poured over the bridge. He caught a snatch of something white out over the river – a stray curl of fog, he thought – and an archer in sterling orange flinging arrows into pegasus bellies and throats of riders.  
Pegasus knights slammed to earth. Bodies sucked up by the grass. Hubert leapt forward, drawing forth the dark ward of Banshee. An arrow burst through the spell and slashed into his thigh.  
Heat and fizzing nerves threw the spell awry. He scrambled up, cast again. The pegasus knights were destroyed. A lioness on horseback charged over their feebly twitching wings and broken riders. Her arrow levelled at his heart.  
Hubert spat the spell at her. No time for niceties. Her horse fumbled in the sudden blackness. She swore, and dashed her heels into its flank.  
Hubert’s leg dropped from under him. His back hit the barricade. Flakes of bark giving way from rotting wood. He smelled blood. If he didn’t kill this Alliance demon she’d be down on Edelgard’s throat in minutes.  
Black sparks jetted from his fingertips. Dull pain struck his chest.  
Leonie slipped from her mount. The beast was unquiet; ears twitching towards the twisted bodies of pegasuses crying their last in the long grass. She let it wander away, towards the river, where it might leave death behind it.  
She was smiling as she pushed Hubert’s hand aside. He had a spell for her. He even had a name for it. But both the name and the magic fell away as Leonie fingered the arrow shaft. It made a wet sound in his chest. He could feel it squashing against his lung. He grasped it, gasping, hot blood sluicing down his chest.  
“You’re stuck fast.”  
The arrow had gone right through him into the rotting beam of oak. Sweat slid down his throat. Sun dazzled his eyes.  
“Then kill me.”  
“After what you did to Captain Jeralt?” Her hard little fist found his stomach. He coughed. She hit him again. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”  
Somewhere out in the long grass of the plain, an insect took flight in a chirrup of gossamer wings.  
Leonie flexed her fist. She flicked the arrow wedged beside Hubert’s heart. His attempts to dislodge it were pitiful. Nor was it weak enough to snap. What magic he could summon had done nothing more than bring about the smell of charring iron, and heat lancing into his chest.  
He didn’t want to beg her to kill him. Would never, in fact. But he hoped she would, and soon.  
She paced. “Don’t you have anything to say to me? Don’t you have an apology? You killed a great man. You killed, and.”  
She paused to smear a tear away.  
“What was it for? What was the point? Did you get it? Did you get what you wanted?”  
Hubert tugged at the arrow. “You’re joking.” If he leant his weight forward – his flesh slivered over the shaft. The head was buried deep in the soft oak, too deep to budge. It was a moment before he could speak. “Slaying Jeralt was – never – Lady Edelgard’s desire.”  
She struck him. Fist into his jaw, brain rattling, thoughts erupting out like arrow fire. “Liar!”  
He gave her no answer. He couldn’t.  
She watched him bleed and drool and lose his sense, until the one leg he could use gave way, and he slid forth on the arrow shaft until the bristled end was sucked into his chest, and then she yanked the arrow from the oak and left him lying on the ground.  
She spat. He wore it on his epaulette, like the badge of office for curs.  
She flicked the note from her belt, and dropped it into the grass as she went to find her horse. “The professor sends her regards.”

  
A month later he could climb the steps to his room again. He could stand to attention in court for hours if Edelgard needed him to. And he had become deft enough to handle the daily change of bandages himself.  
“If you’re certain, my lady.”  
“Yes, I,” Edelgard perched on the edge of her bed, in nightgown and slippers, white hair brushed loose over her shoulder. She looked ridiculously un-emperorlike. Her mouth tweaked. “Get some rest, Hubert. I can blow out my own candle.”  
“Such is not prescribed for an emperor,” he said, slouching in the doorway.  
She caught his joke, and smirked.  
His room was one below hers in the tower – presumably to give him a stab at invading forces before they got to her. Perhaps too to remind a vassal of his place.  
He mulled the thought as he took the steps, one by one, pausing often to rest his lungs and leg. He stood alone in a pocket of candlelight. Distant noises – a snore, a groan of settling beams, the armoured footstep of a patrolling guard – these were the noises of the house, and comforting. As known to him as the scent of melting wax and the damp stone of his bedroom.  
There was nowhere he would rather be, and yet.  
Hubert fingered the wound through its bandage. Reading the tremor of jangling nerves like the letter he’d found crumpled on his bedside after Gronder Field.  
“I still love you – let us talk.”  
With a sigh that threatened to extinguish his candle, he hobbled down the last step, into his empty room.

**Author's Note:**

> I was struck by the violence and sympathy of the Golden Deer timeline. Them feels! Byleth's strategy at Gronder is to take out Dimitri and Edelgard as quickly as possible, to avoid unnecessary casualties, but she realises she can't get to Edelgard without going through Hubert. Unable to face him, she leaves Leonie with a note to deliver. Leonie, however, has her own scores to settle.  
Such were my feels on this map!


End file.
